Collection Scope and Content Note

Included are military correspondence and intelligence reports, personal correspondence,
diaries, including a journal McHugh kept on his trip over the Burma Road (Dec. 1938-Jan.
1939), photographs (ca. 1300 items, many not precisely identified, of wartime figures,
and colleagues and friends), manuscripts of articles and books, and printed items.

Subjects of the correspondence and reports to 1946 include China, the Sino-Japanese War,
McHugh's association with the Chiangs, T.V. Soong, Ai-Ling Soong (Madame H.H. Kung), and
other Chinese public figures, the management of the Bank of China, disputes among
American interests with contracts for supplying the Chinese Air Force.

Other subjects include bribery of Chinese officials, administration of Lend-Lease in
China, construction and use of the Burma Road, bombing of the British gunboat H.M.S.
"Sandpiper," work of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), Japan and the Japanese people,
bombing of Pearl Harbor, and activities of William Henry Donald, advisor to the Chiangs,
Nelson Trusler Johnson, Clarence Gauss, Hyman G. Rickover, Evans F. Carlson, and Claire
Lee Chennault.

After 1946, the letters are primarily analyses of events of national and international
importance, such as the civil war in Indo-China and Vietnamese conflict, Soviet-American
relations, Sino-Soviet relations, U.S.presidential elections, foreign policies of the
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, written to and from various
representatives of Jardine, Matheson & Co. and Balfour, Guthrie & Co., including
Hugh David MacEwen Barton, David Bosanquet, Michael Alexander Robert Young-Herries, John
Henry Keswick, William Johnson Keswick, and Erik Watts; also correspondence with Richard
R. Smith, formerly with the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT) in Shanghai, on world
affairs and on Smith's life in California.